Witness
by Missed Nin
Summary: Alyx Vance sees a lot, as the daughter of a leader of the Resistance. She remembers a lot, and it's sometimes difficult to know whether there's much to hope for, living like they do. Challenge, character study, beware of spoilers for Episode 2.


The first thing I've written for HL fandom. This is an entry for the WA Random Challenge, based on the words _witness_ and _time_.

* * *

There was a day when Alyx was still young; perhaps seven, perhaps nine, that she'd remember forever. She'd been soldering connections in a lock-breaker device when two Resistance members came in holding a third up, and although dad had told her not to pay attention to all the comings and goings in the base, she'd looked out of the corner of her eyes to see what was happening. She remembered why she'd looked: there'd been a strange wet sniffling sound, like someone crying but at the same time not at all like that, and it had been so loud in the quiet of the lab room. So she'd looked around and been faced by a man with a smashed in face and bubbles of blood coming from his nostrils, curled in on himself and moaning while his friends supported him, blood staining their clothes. The sight had been frozen into her memory indelibly.

Predictably, she'd had nightmares. She'd crouched at the corner of her dad's bed, hands playing with the quilt until she found the courage to do two difficult things: to confess her disobedience and admit to her fear.

Her father had put an arm around her and stroked her hair, and she'd fallen asleep there. The next morning, she put the incident out of her mind.

Until he came and spoke to her. Maybe this was the same day, but maybe it was a few weeks later. What she remembered was sitting on a rooftop at sunset with a light breeze blowing, looking down at an overgrown park with moss climbing a child's slide, ivy creeping up the climbing frame. The weeds and bushes taking over the grass had looked bleak and ill kept in the winter, being as they were evidence of the new regime's carelessness. Now, though, spring made them look vigorous and cheerful and bright against the grey city. Eli Vance looked at his daughter, kind faced and hopeful in the warm light of the evening.

"Alyx, remember this. One day, you'll tell your children about these times. One day they won't believe you were a little girl making guns for freedom fighters in a war. One day you'll tell them stories and they'll sit and wonder how we lived." He smiled down at her and Alyx turned her young face up to him, imagining a world where she was a mother and there were no Combine soldiers. "They won't believe it, that their beautiful mother lived in hiding and helped her poor old dad build weapons."

"But you'll tell them I'm not lying, daddy, won't you?"

Eli laughed, and the setting sun made his face glow.

* * *

When she was seventeen and the guerilla war was still being waged, her father's hair had started to go gray. Nowadays, she'd patch up the victims of the Combine and their beatings without flinching or blinking; nowadays, she was strong and competent and knew all the patrol routes and how and when to avoid them. So when one day Eli Vance told his daughter they were making history, he was talking to a member of the Resistence, not just his daughter.

It was certainly something new they were doing. Working with Dr Kleiner, Eli had finished the prototype Teleportation device, using technology entirely new to the human race, if not so novel to their alien conquerors. Preparing the machine for its first test run, he grinned at her.

"You're a witness to the first great scientific advance of the future, you know. Remember this day."

He was kind of joking, and Alyx felt annoyed. Their unwilling assistant – Barney Calhoun - was late, there were thousands more checks to make and she was trying to calibrate the input co-ordinates right. Too many little details, too much potential for it all to go wrong. She grunted a reply: ninety-eight percent of her attention was busy rebooting the binaries that fed the data from the mapping program to the actual machine.

"I'm serious, you know. We could have stayed in a holding pattern, just trying not to lose too much ground to the CP goons. But we're moving forward: we're got some of their technology and we're making it work. This is a historic day. Don't forget it."

She looked at him. Her dad was always tired, nowadays. He and Dr Kleiner had been working harder on this project than the group could really afford, and with the ever-present logistical stress of keeping the resistance hidden and well supplied weighing down on him at the same time as all this ground-breaking physics, well, she wondered if it wasn't desperation talking. She'd always held the hope for the future that her father had taught her close: a vital secret belief, nestling in her soul like a religion. It fitted in with stories of the vanished hero Gordon Freeman and his triumphs at Black Mesa, fiercely positive, but it was a deeper faith than that... mythology. She'd always believed her free world would become reality one day.

But a free future still seemed distant. When she'd been twelve she'd wondered if she'd be able to have a grand wedding and a public celebration, if they'd be free by then. A daydream. But it had been a deeply sincere fantasy: she'd genuinely thought the teenager Resistance members who planned to elope and escape the way the cities enforced sterility were being impatient. She'd disapproved of it. In the end, though, it had been her who'd been naive. Her hope was equally foolish. A teleportation device could be an important strategic asset, but it would be less useful than, say, the robot Dog was. It wasn't enough to hang her hopes on.

* * *

After meeting Gordon Freeman, all the future Alyx could think about the immediate one: how do we get past here or away from these enemies, how much ammo can we afford to use, how the hell will that car survive this stunt. When will the lift come, because there's a hell of a lot of Zombine waiting for it... There wasn't much time for hopes. And so, it wasn't until she was hundreds of miles away from the city that had been her prison all her life that she did wonder about the future. She was out in the open land, uncontrolled by the Combine. And she was watching the culmination of all their plans since the start of this desperate escape: a rocket's launch carring what was quite probably the human race's only hope for survival. She was in the countryside, free, with the Resistance, fully healed, watching in sheer elated triumph and hardly believing they were still alive after such a difficult dangerous terrifying journey. It was in this situation that Alyx remembered her dad's talk about historic moments.

"We're witnesses," she murmured.

Gordon was standing beside her, looking serenely up into the sky with a finger on the bridge of his glasses, a very small smile on his face. He looked across at her, and she repeated herself:

"We're witnesses for a better future."

And as she spoke a smile spread across her face too, and the hero scientist turned to face her and they grinned at each other, and for a moment the future was going to be _excellent_.

* * *

Until it wasn't. Because Alyx couldn't believe this had happened. She didn't want to. In that future-family in her dreams, the one where she'd tell happy innocent children stories about the fighting that was over now, she'd only recognised one of the faces: not her future-self's or her children's or her husbands; only her dad's. He'd have been older but he _still should have been there._

So she didn't want to be a witness, from then on. Maybe it was revenge she wanted, maybe it was only freedom from a world she hated. Maybe time would dim that motivation, maybe in the future her dreams would come back and stronger. But until then, Alyx Vance was going to live and fight in the now. And she was going to win.


End file.
